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I’ve not been my most perky self of late, and in some way this should not come as a surprise. The gray month of January has never been my favorite month, especially after the Christmas tree comes down. But the degree of my blecchhhnnness has rattled even me. Yes, it has to do with watching the news which is bad. Very bad. Yes, it has to do with the weather. But I suspect this January has been particularly rough personally because of the health situation. I’m someone who has benefitted from a pretty fit existence before this year and the “chronic condition thing” is newer to me than it is to a good number of you who, I realize, have dealt with illness longer and have much more wisdom than I to share in this regard.
What seems to have tossed me over the edge in the past week was a chain of emails in which I had to bow out of events I’d once had scheduled on my calendar and say “no” to a couple new invitations that I would have jumped at in the past. A particular arrow through the heart was sending a note to a group I love in Largo, FL where I was supposed to be today. With the flu epidemic, I’ve also spent more time away from the “togetherness” that we associate with being human…. Not only over the holidays but in daily life. Places like Sunday Family Mass, grocery stores, and coffee shops. I don’t write this as a plea to reach out to me, but rather more of an explanation as to why I’m less communicative if you have. Like everyone else, I realize that it is good for humans to be integrated into community life, and that if one can’t get there physically then they can try to show up on Zoom, or make a phone call, or return an email. But the weird thing is that the more I get nudged to the sidelines of ordinary interactions, the more energy it seems to take to participate, even in the ones I could.
Which is why it was a particular gift for me in the last couple days to get sent the chapter of an old book* on “the vocation of the sick and aging person” (because, yeah, aging is not an easy thing to work through either, right?). The author, James Empereur, notes something those in my household have probably been observing for weeks now: “Dependency, despondency, irritability, and indifference may be as debilitating as the actual physical disease.” Yup. But the person who is no longer at their physical peak still has a special role to play in the Church community, Empereur claims: “They are called to proclaim that sickness and old age need not be a threat to their fellow Christians whose lives need not be characterized by fragmentation.” Now that is an ennobling and challenging notion, isn’t it? What is the witness I (and maybe many of you) offer others by the way I/we live this season of life?
The author goes on to talk about the Anointing of the Sick as a sacrament like Baptism—a rite of passage anointing one to take on this new role in the community. As the introduction to the rite itself states, “The role of the sick in the Church is to remind others not to lose sight of the essential or higher things and so to show that our moral life is restored through the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.” Again, I am feeling more encouraged just as I read it. What are the essential or higher things I’m learning something about this month?
I remind myself that I’ve been anointed a couple times now—once in the emergency room of the hospital on October 7th (Fr. Patrick, I have the faintest memory of your face there, but remember your kindness!) and once at St. Ignatius House where I was fully cognizant and with a group of chaplains and a couple of family members. Very special to me is knowing that the CGS community surrounding the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana where I have visited many times gathered to remember me in their regular Anointing of the Sick service last month. This is a community with a long history of taking anointing very seriously and their prayer is powerful. As I sit and just look at the picture they sent to me of the event (see attached), I feel my bleecchhhhnnness diminish.
Indeed, for a moment there in the middle of writing this, I felt my bleechhnness so fade that I decided to try to go walking outside. I regret to report that it is 34 degrees and windy in Atlanta right now. I know that for some of you that is what you call “spring like weather” but I do not, so I am back inside after less than a mile and at my desk with hot tea, but still feeling less bleecchhh.
May each of us continue to receive whatever strength needed to be the people the world needs us to be—a call that might change with the seasons but is no less important.
*James Empereur. “Anointing: Sacrament of Vocation” (chapter 4) in Prophetic Anointing: God’s Call to the Sick, Elderly, and the Dying (Michael Glazier, 1982). Pp. 141-202